“I think the debate is about when life begins,” Paul said, stating the problem, but not the solution, something he has become very adept at doing. “Is it OK for an 8-pound baby to be aborted one week before delivery? If the mother says she’s anxious and wants to ‘kill myself,’ you can have the abortion one day before it’s due?”

Paul was speaking at the University of Chicago in an event sponsored by its Institute of Politics. His questioner was the institute’s founder and former Obama aide, David Axelrod. And Axelrod tried to pin Paul down several times. But it was like trying to pin down quicksand.

Axelrod asked Paul to state when he thinks life begins.

“My personal religious belief is that life begins at the very beginning,” Paul said.

He then said that currently the abortion debate in America is between those who believe in “all life and no abortion, or all abortion and no life.”

“I think the law will come down in between,” Paul said. “I think the public is in the middle.”

Politics can include the art of saying nothing — some men have been elected president by saying nothing at all, but saying it well — but it is hard to see Paul surviving the modern-day presidential primary meat grinder of debate after debate with a campaign based on platitudes.

Asked about U.S. intervention — a sticky issue with Libertarians, who usually favor no intervention unless terrorists are actually landing troops on the shores of New Jersey — Paul dove quickly into the muddle once again.

He said the argument is between two extremes, “those who would fight nowhere” and those who would fight “everywhere all the time.”

But is that really true? Is it really that simple? And what foreign policy would President Paul derive from that keen analysis?

“Let’s try not to be Pollyanna about making the world ‘safe for democracy,’” Paul said, using a phrase coined by Woodrow Wilson 97 years ago and rarely, if ever, invoked today.

But wouldn’t Paul intervene to prevent an atrocity overseas like the Holocaust, even if U.S. security were not at stake? Axelrod asked.

“Haiti, after the earthquake, yeah,” Paul said. “And atrocity in Africa? Yeah, we can help to corral other countries.”

But a real problem, Paul said, is how much the United States wastes every year on foreign aid.

“Government to government aid is the history of corruption,” Paul said. “Almost invariably, the money is stolen. We should vastly reduce foreign aid — especially to countries where they burn our flag.”

It was not all “Looney Tunes.” At one point, Paul quoted Marx. Not Karl — but Groucho.

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong remedies,” Paul said, giving Groucho full credit.

But I think Paul believes this joke is revealed truth. And he believes it is safest to not look for trouble, to make no real diagnoses and apply no remedies whatsoever. That way, you offend the least number of people.

It may not solve any of America’s problems, but it could get a guy elected.

“I don’t say that the president is a bad person,” Paul said, referring to Barack Obama. “But I worry about the next president and the next.”